About "Crossing the Chasm" and reflexive markets

Time has arrived to start posting real thoughts of mine; this far I had used my blog only as a "to-do" list (mind you, I needed a place with easy access to bits of documentation). Now that I use del.icio.us for that purpose, I have extra space for writing, and some bits of my own to share.

For those not familiar with Crossing the chasm, it is a theory of Geoffrey A. Moore about adoption of technology. As the bottomline, the technology markets can be divided by the early adopters of a product, the early majority and the late majority. This is not something new (works the same for almost every market), but Moore points that the first 16% (technology enthusiasts) do not speak with the next 34% (the pragmatists), where the money is. So, there is a gap between both worlds that must be crossed in order to become mainstream. Which explains, for example, the historical paradox between struts and webwork.



That was a sales graph. A market penetration graph has the same form, but accumulative (more of a S-shaped form):



Back to IT, the blogs I read are written mostly by technology enthusiasts, yet the products they evangelize must be taken with a grain of salt. The open source world is a live ecosystem with small chances of survival, often not based on technical merit.

This concept is common use to marketing people, but the average technical joe doesn't give a crap about it. Well, we buy products: we decide every day if Spring, Struts, JSF, EJB3 is the framework that will: (a) cross the chasm, and (b) survive the technical inflation during the project life cycle. I like the technical inflation expression to visualize the natural decay that a technology experiences during a project, making it obsolete for the final delivery date.

We should develop the instinct to choose the right product for our project, maybe guessing where we are (what kind of organization are we part of) and where the evaluated product is. Innovation is not for everyone, and a sane decision would diversify risk and put a percentage of our frameworks ahead the chasm. Anyway, most of us have been doing this for some time.

The next turn of this wheel is what George A. Soros calls reflexive markets:

"In certain circumstances, markets can affect the so-called fundamentals which they are supposed to reflect."


Which means that all marketing people worth his salt will try to seem as they have already crossed the chasm no matter in which stage they are. Marketing campaigns are oriented to look like they have been already adopted by the mainstream, which helps very little to make the informed decision.

Oh, well. I suppose there is no alternative to learning the hard way.